Customer Reviews

Score Reading: A Key to the Music Experience

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This book belongs in the hands of every aspiring orchestral musician, conductor, and avocational music-lover. Ambitious high-school students and conservatory undergraduates will especially appreciate the clarity and concision with which Dickreiter (through Pauly's fine translation) illuminates the labyrinth of abbreviations, symbols and page layout details for deciphering orchestral scores. Best of all, the book answers most basic questions about instrumentation (including foreign terminology, clefs and transpositions), performance practice and history, without forcing the reader to hunt down the information in several other sources.

Musicians searching for practice material in reducing scores at the piano will not find it in this book, but they will find a handy reference with a sound review of orchestral history and instrumentation. Aspiring conductors will find a valuable introduction to their craft and all readers will appreciate the clarity of the text which conveys information without the baggage of elitist condescension or that chatty hand-holding which bloats many mass market "how to" or "dummies" books. Several of the score examples employ a format (found in the Norton Scores) that highlights prominent melodic lines with gray shading. This illustrates the dynamics of score reading very clearly for novices.

The chapters are as follows: 1) Introduction, 2) Types of Scores, 3) The Look of a Score, 4) Scores and Their History, 5) Reading a Score - Hearing a Score, 6) Examples for Practicing Score Reading, 7) Orchestras and Conductors, 8) Instrumentation and Score Reading: Suggestions for Further Reading.

As a Composition and Conducting major, it's a nice, well-written book which reveals a way how to you read a score while listening to it. For real Score Reading purposes ("hacking the Orchestral Score on the piano), I wouldn't recommend it so much because although it consists of excerpts, it's not practical enough because of the format. Probably di Lassus, Bach Chorales and later the "Kunst der Fuge" are still the best way to improve your reading of the clefs before you can start reading a full score using the clefs for the transposition. For everybody who's not a conducting major, it could be a very useful book as an introduction to score reading or actually score listening

This is an easy read. Meant for those who would like to be able to follow a musical score and enjoy the listening experience. many musical citations throughout the text illustrate what is being explained in the text.